Market-oriented reforms in China have transformed enterprise employment systems, yet localized employment arrangements continue to persist and adapt within market-oriented firms. This study examines how enterprise employment systems change through processes of organizational translation, focusing on how locality is mediated within organizational practices. Drawing on a case study of the zidi gong (employee descendants) system at X Company, a reformed state-owned enterprise, we challenges interpretations that treat kinship-based employment as a residual legacy of the socialist planned economy. Based on multiple rounds of fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival materials, the analysis shows that the zidi gong system is rooted in local conditions, including land requisition, labor supply, skill transmission, and cultural traditions. However, these localized elements do not directly determine employment practices. Instead, X Company actively translates locality into legitimate and functional employment arrangements by selectively integrating local resources, redefining their organizational functions, and institutionalizing them within the firm’s employment system. Through this process, kinship-based employment is transformed from a contextual condition into a stabilized organizational practice. Although the zidi gong system originated in earlier local arrangements rather than as a direct response to market transition, market-oriented reform altered the institutional conditions under which it had to be justified, formalized, and recalibrated. As market pressures intensified, X Company further reconfigured the system through procedural reforms and narrative reframing, embedding it within a functionally segmented multi-track employment structure. By foregrounding organizational translation as a key mechanism linking locality and employment systems, this study contributes to broader debates on employment systems and hybrid organizations in transitional economies.
Migrant workers often experience job mobility and employment instability, making their work inherently vulnerable and insecure. For some, self-employment offers reprieve, providing greater control over working conditions and creating long-term stability. Drawing on qualitative research in Shu County, Anhui Province, an interior labor sending region, this study examines how the migration histories of return migrants shape their transition to becoming self-employed. This research reveals an interplay between individual agency and four structural constraints: household responsibilities, local political-economic structure, social embeddedness and institutional frameworks. Participants exhibited three forms of agency—reactive, proactive, and challenged—in navigating these constraints. These forms emerge dynamically through negotiation with accumulated migration capital, life circumstances and local conditions. However, self-employment in low-industrialized interior counties often perpetuates vulnerabilities such as instability, limited growth and market susceptibility, challenging romanticized narratives of entrepreneurship. While migrants exercise strategic agency, county-level constraints such as shrinking consumer bases and weak institutional support create structural limits on sustainability. This research demonstrates that self-employment is not simply a matter of empowerment or constraint, but rather a contested terrain where individual capacities and county-specific political economies dynamically interact. It offers a nuanced understanding of return migration in contemporary China.
This paper examines several empirical case studies to explore how social computing can be used to study emergent phenomena in social systems. A case study of China’s venture capital (VC) industry demonstrates how positive feedback between VC investment behavior and industry network structure, leads to the emergence of a “small-world network with an elite-clique” phenomenon, explaining how individual action contributes to collective emergence. The case of a large technology company illustrates the evolution of team innovation and the factors behind the emergence of its high levels of innovation. Additionally, this case demonstrates differences in factors influencing the innovation capabilities of internal subsystems before and after systemic transformation, shedding light on the impact of non-linear development on employee behavior. These cases essentially highlight the feasibility of combining survey data with big data as well as the viability in employing various social computing methods in complex system research.
Spatial perspective is one of the important growth points of intergenerational mobility research. Determining a region’s intergenerational mobility not only involves situating the internal characteristics of its social structure, but also its external spatial relations (i.e., its spatial location and surrounding social resources). Advanced levels of industrialization, large income dispersion, and sufficient social welfare resources in surrounding areas (of a specific location) can promote intergenerational mobility in a region as the “spatial spillover effect”. Using data from the 2010–2017 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), this paper explores regional differences and formation mechanisms underlying intergenerational mobility. The study findings indicate significant regional differences in intergenerational mobility within China, with a distribution pattern of “large dispersion and small concentration”, concluding with several key questions for future research.
Abstract This article examines the lived contradictions of boutique fashion salespersons in urban China, focusing on how shop managers reorganize sales work through digital platforms. Drawing on eighteen months of multi-sited ethnographic research, we show that platforms like WeChat and RedNote do not drive workers autonomously; rather, managers utilize these infrastructures to integrate in-store service, aesthetic curation, and constant online engagement into a single labor regime. We highlight three empirical patterns. First, managers exert platform-enabled control over “creative” labor by setting strict posting rules and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) like targets, turning self-branding into routine work that primarily benefits the boutique. Second, managers institutionalize “always-on” clienteling via WeChat, leveraging commission attribution to normalize unpaid after-hours messaging as a requirement of professionalism. Third, workers’ accumulated “digital assets” (followers, client networks) rarely yield career mobility because they remain materially tethered to store inventory and the brand halo, preventing portability after exit. We conceptualize this dynamic as digital trapped aspiration: a condition where workers endure intensified, partially unpaid labor to accumulate transferable cultural capital, only to find their gains structurally locked within the employer’s enterprise. Integrating labor process theory and digital labor studies, we argue that platforms function not as autonomous drivers, but as the conditions of possibility that make this managerial extraction and normalization of unpaid work enforceable and meaningful through permanent connectivity, metricized visibility, and dependence on private traffic.
Drawing on experimental and reverse-engineering approaches, this study situates algorithmic governance within the broader context of digital society and reflects on results of an experiment where multiple virtual accounts were constructed that engage in long-term, realistic interactions with digital platforms in order to penetrate the politicized “black box” of algorithms. It examines how algorithmic governance shapes the heterogeneity of information acquisition among users. Empirical findings reveal that in the digital era, algorithmic governance has become highly complex, sophisticated and concealed. At the information theme level, algorithms increase users’ exposure to diverse topical content. However, at the level of information semantics, algorithms reinforce the filter bubble effect, leading to the narrowing and enclosure of information flows. This study reveals how different individuals are situated by algorithms within relatively bounded positions in semantic vector spaces, and receive information confined to specific semantic dimensions.
Against the backdrop of China’s promotion of Youth-Friendly Cities, this research addresses the core puzzle of how young people’s willingness to settle in a city is generated. It argues that prevailing studies, with their focus on objective socio-economic factors, have largely overlooked the subjective cultural mechanisms shaping these life-altering choices. Through in-depth interviews with 45 digitally articulated young adults who have experienced cross-regional mobility, this research has developed a process-oriented model that explains the dynamic construction of settlement decisions. The findings indicate that young people’s choices are guided not by a rational scan of all urban options, but by a personalized cultural toolkit forged from their life experience, group interactions, and local cultural logics. This decision-making process unfolds as a strategic negotiation between their toolkit and real-world structural constraints, a dynamic in which individuals pragmatically adjust strategies using mechanisms this research terms “tool reorganization” and “tool downgrading”. The final choices, often marked by contingency and compromise, are ultimately integrated into a coherent personal narrative that allows individuals to actively construct meaning and a sense of belonging. In elucidating the origins and application of this cultural toolkit, this research reveals how mobility and uncertainties trigger the chronic activation of discursive consciousness, compelling young people to agentively navigate their settlement trajectories. In this way, this study offers a new perspective on youth mobility and urban settlement.
Abstract Class identification (or CI) is not merely a present-oriented self-positioning but also a temporal judgment spanning the past, present and future. This study introduces the concept of the CI Temporal Map, defined as a cross-temporal cultural framework that individuals internalize when evaluating their past, present and future class positions. The map encompasses three elements broadly shared across societies: an upward trajectory of mobility, middle-class aspirations as the normative endpoint, and midlife as the critical age benchmark. Within this framework, individuals construct CI Temporal Trajectories that link past, present and future CIs. Using nationally representative data from the 2010–2021 Chinese General Social Survey, our analysis shows CI Temporal Trajectories in China exhibit an overall upward trend. Regarding socio-temporal effects, age effects follow a pronounced U-shaped curve, while period effects display moderate fluctuations, and cohort effects remain relatively weak. This study also reveals the overall transformation of CIs by Chinese residents in psychological time: from a “pyramid” shape in the past to an “onion” shape at present, and moving toward an “olive” shape in the future. This study not only explains the coexistence of collective optimism and group-specific pessimism, but also reconceptualizes CI as a temporal narrative of where one stands, where one is heading, and when one is expected to arrive.
This study examines the interactions among online literature platforms, online literature studios, and online literature writers by exploring the organizational dynamics of prosumers within the production processes of Chinese online literature platforms. In-depth interviews with 30 online literature writers, 6 editors, and 2 studio owners revealed that online literature studios are self-organizing labor collectives formed by writers based on shared economic interests. These studios seek market-driven benefits from the grassroots level in relation to the platforms. Considering the strong market orientation of online literature studios, platforms tend to both allow and regulate them. As a result, online literature studios have evolved into intermediary entities within the platforms’ literary production systems, serving as critical conduits for implementing platform algorithms. Writers become motivated to proactively join these studios in pursuit of economic stability. This evolution in labor choices among online literature writers reflects a transition from relational embedding to organizational embedding, signifying the emergence of a form of commercial solidarity initiated by workers from below. However, this also gives rise to structural tension stemming from labor differentiation.
This paper explores the historical entanglement of feminist discourses and nationalist agendas in early twentieth-century China. Through a Foucauldian lens of the archaeology of knowledge, it examines how women were objectified as symbols of societal weakness and tools for national rejuvenation. The discursive strategy, centered on the questions “why did women become a problem in early twentieth-century China?” and “how can we solve this problem?” prioritized transforming women into symbols of modernization. Focusing on the writings of male intellectuals such as Liang Qichao, Ma Junwu, and Jin Tianhe, the paper traces the emergence of the “Mother of the Nation” image as a dual symbol, representing national revival, while becoming an object of political regulation. The case of the “Heavenly Breast Movement” in the 1920s further demonstrates how abstract discourses of women’s emancipation were developed into biopolitical practices that disciplined female bodies in the service of modernization. The findings illustrate that the early feminist claims were articulated within a nationalist framework that instrumentalized women’s emancipation, subordinating individual agency to the imperatives of nation-building and redefining gender equality in terms of its contribution to national strength. In doing so, it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the intersections between gender, modernization, and nationalism in early twentieth-century China.
Abstract Drawing on data from the World Values Survey (1990–2018) and grounded in modernization and social transformation theories, this study examines the evolution of Chinese people’s attitudes toward work and life over the past three decades. The results reveal a general shift from “production-centered” to “life-centered” orientations. This specifically indicates that during the 1990s, work-centered values intensified, but since the early 2000s, they gradually weakened. As a key dimension of individual life, family orientation declined temporarily between 1990 and the early 2000s but later re-emerged as a factor central to everyday life. Leisure orientation, meanwhile, strengthened alongside socioeconomic development. In addition, class differences in these orientations have changed over time, and individual attitudes are found to relate more closely to their life-cycle stage than to their birth cohort.
The investigation of heterogeneous treatment effects is a current focus for many empirical sociologists. This article considers causal random forests and Bayesian additive regression trees as methods to demonstrate how algorithmic approaches potentially transcend conventional model-form and covariate-selection restrictions, and can examine complex interactions between the treatment effect and covariates. These two methods, respectively, illustrate the ideas of “matching” and “simulation”, and provide estimates of the individual treatment effect. This enables scholars to examine the empirical distribution of treatment effects and investigate the determinants of their heterogeneity. However, algorithm-based methods can also pose new challenges. For instance, arbitrariness in parameter configuration and algorithm variation can undermine the consistency of empirical results.
Rather than serving merely as an ideological construct, common prosperity can be conceptualized as an analytical concept amenable to both theoretical reflection and empirical investigation. When aligned with microjustice principles, it fosters efficiency and enhances individual well-being by enabling people to attain outcomes that they justly deserve. At the macro level, when common prosperity embodies macrojustice, it advances collective well-being and promotes happiness by reducing perceived uncertainties in social life. Drawing on data from the 2010 China General Social Survey (CGSS2010), this study finds that perceptions of micro-level fairness are significantly associated with recognition of microjustice principles, but not with endorsement of the macrojustice principle of minimizing income disparities. Conversely, perceptions of macro level fairness are significantly related to recognition of the income disparity–minimization principle, but not to microjustice principles. Both perceptions are negatively associated with endorsement of egalitarian principles, while each independently enhances subjective well-being, with their effects being additive.
This study examines the mechanism of consent production within the emerging occupation of gaming companionship, using Bixin, China's largest gaming companion platform, as a case. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 18 gaming companions, we explore how consent is manufactured amid conditions of income instability. Despite the precarious nature of their work, gaming companions generally express high job satisfaction and a sense of fairness, believing in the value of hard work and attributing their income variations to personal effort and choices. We argue that the dashenfen (god-tier score) control system provides workers with a sense of autonomy, as they feel empowered to make their own strategic choices in managing relationships with clients. However, this is a "structured autonomy" as this architecture of choice is designed to align their self-interest with platform goals. Moreover, besides the unique workforce consisting of youngsters which allows for the acceptance of fluctuating job opportunities and income, the control mechanism cultivates an ideology of "gaming meritocracy"; it blends meritocratic ideals with elements of gaming culture. This individualizes and normalizes the inherent instability of platform work, thereby encouraging active participation in a highly uncertain environment.
In the production of artificial intelligence products that appeal to human–computer interaction, cognitive labor related to human abilities such as recognition, judgment and creation has become a dominant labor form. In data labeling work, the labor control goal of cognitive labor is to transform the natural cognition of the labeler into generative cognition that matches a computer program to efficiently produce standardized data that meets the needs of the computer. In this regard, management subtly manipulates data labelers’ cognitive behavior through cognitive standardization, cognitive feedback and cognitive acceleration; the latter resists alienated labor by means of output restrictions, quarrels and job hopping. From physical to cognitive labor, the object of management control changes from the way workers move their bodies to their brains’ cognitive patterns, and labor control strategies move from mechanical body discipline to flexible cognitive guidance.
In post-patriarchal China, contemporary weddings are a key site for intergenerational negotiation, carrying conflicts and compromises shaped by cultural perceptions, gender ideologies and power dynamics. Through Critical Thematic Analysis (CTA) of interviews with 15 well-educated young brides from urban China, this study identifies four themes: a traditional vs. modern wedding debate; collaboration vs. control in intra-family relations; divergent vs. convergent expectations of wedding performances; and resistance vs. persistence of patriarchy. Critically analyzing each theme unveils several key findings: there are uncritical cultural identities across generations; unstable and uneven conditions of inverted families; intergenerational exploitation (one generation’s sacrifice serving another’s interests) based on gender bias and class disparities; and ambivalent gender perceptions of young brides and illusory gender equality (a superficial appearance of equality masking deeper inequalities) at weddings. Situated within the evolving socio-political, economic and cultural environment of contemporary China, this research highlights the complex interplay of cultural ideologies, gender perceptions, family values and intergenerational power dynamics in post-patriarchal Chinese society, offering a feminist critique of urban wedding negotiations.
Through an examination of the apprenticeship system within the hairdressing industry in Song County, Shandong Province, this study finds that, since the 1990s, the master-apprentice relationship has gradually shifted from a quasi-family relationship to a quasi-employment relationship, transitioning from a foundation of qing ((sic); affection) to one of li ((sic); profit). This study employs a yi-li-qing ((sic)-(sic)-(sic); obligation- profit- affection) analytical framework to analyze the dynamics within this shifting master-apprenticeship relationship. The quasi-family relationship is essentially an affection-based relationship with genuine obligation and subdued utility, where ethical guidelines for master-apprentice identities are emphasized, emotional connections from sustained interaction are valued, and demands for profit are relatively minor. In contrast, the quasi-employment relationship represents an instrumental relationship where profit-oriented interests are becoming the standard and goal of interaction, while ethical norms and affectional bonds play only a limited regulatory role. Compared to a sentiment-instrumentality dual framework, the yi-li-qing framework provides a more comprehensive depiction of the intrinsic attributes of guanxi, illustrating the dynamics and complexities arising from shifts in the social structure.
In response to the crisis of organizational regulation posed by new forms of cybercrime, the imperative to sustain the so-called “miracle of sustained social stability” in the digital age has become central to the transformation of crime governance. Within the analytical framework of state capacity, I argue that platform-based governance offers a pathway for this transformation across technological, organizational, and institutional dimensions. This governance model encompasses both governance via mega-platforms and governance via integrated comprehensive platforms. These two modes of governance are characterized by technical arrangements centered on data control, organizational strategies aimed at social integration, and institutional mechanisms grounded in preventive legal norms. Their development follows a “technology → organization → institution” logic, which constructs a system of digital bureaucracy. The significance of this shift lies not only in addressing the crisis of governance capacity through governance through platforms, but also in aspiring toward governance of platforms, a normative turn that emphasizes principles of good law and governance (liangfa shanzhi) and rationality of value.
This study examines whether the cognitive ability of girls in China is impaired by having brothers. It explores the mechanisms through which having brothers affects the cognitive development of sisters and the reasons behind these impacts. Results using data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) leveraging the one-child policy and policies prohibiting gender selection to minimize the endogeneity of sibling size and sibling gender, suggest that: (1) having brothers is associated with lower cognitive ability of teenage girls, while no significant association is observed for boys; (2) parental expectations and the expectations of girls for themselves regarding education, are important mechanisms behind these associations; and (3) son preference is mainly attributed to potential parental needs for old-age support rather than ancestral worship inherent within the traditions of Confucian culture. These findings highlight the importance of changing traditional gender attitudes by improving the pension system and certain infrastructure, and by further guaranteeing equal rights for women in the labor market.
Food saving is a pressing global challenge, and understanding its divergent framings is vital for designing effective strategies. This study examines the alignment and divergence between media discourse and individual attitudes toward food saving in China using a mixed-methods approach that combines content analysis of 123 news articles with Q-methodology involving 60 participants. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework of seven value orders, the research identifies “domesticity” as a core value emphasized by both media and individuals, while media narratives underrepresent values such as “the environment” and “inspiration,” which are central to individual perspectives. This misalignment highlights why awareness campaigns often fail to effect substantial behavioral change. By analyzing the interplay between media narratives and public attitudes, the study not only provides actionable insights for policymakers and educators in China, but also offers a transferable model for interpreting frame (mis)alignment in other rapidly modernizing, state-led contexts. The proposed multi-level explanatory model contributes to international food policy scholarship by advancing the theoretical understanding of how value orders shape, and sometimes constrain, effective interventions in food saving governance.
